Shay Farrelly

Like lots of members of camera clubs I have over 20,000 images in my Lightroom catalogue but very few of them ever get printed, except some of the better ones for competitions or salons. And I've had a few criticisms like when will we ever get to see some of your photographs. So I put some up on the web, but you still get "I'd prefer to see actual photographs", a fair enough criticism. So in the past I've use a few book publishing services to print family and holiday pictures, but noone of them have reached the quality of the publications you get from Blurb and in particular with their new ProLine range of books. Yesterday I received my shiny new large landscape format on their ProLine Pearl paper, and it's gorgeous. The large format is just great but the paper is lovely. It creates bright vibrant images, it's heavy and it handles very well. I decided to do a book of my images from my trips to South Africa and Cuba, the book is just under 160 pages and I love it. Took it to the gang from the club that went on the trips and they loved it too, in fact soime said they would have ordered two, one to display and one to hide away in the original wrapping.

I can't recommend Blurb enough!

As an enthusiastic amateur photographer I have thousands of images, but most of these don't really see the light of day, they never get printed, except the ones I want to use for competitions, and I always get comments like, "we never really see any photos you take". This was one of the reasons I set up a couple of websites so I can publish my images and have family and friends see them. Then there's Flickr, Facebook and a myriad of other sites where we can show off our work. Slide-shows and videos can also be used. But still a lot of people say, "I prefer to see actual real images" not just on the internet or a PC, iPad or TV. So through a few members of the camera club I was introduced to Blurb.com, which is a website to make and publish your own photobook. You can personalise the book in any way you want and you can include print as well as photographs. I used the facility to download their software package that allows you design and create you book locally on your PC and once you have finished you can copy it up and have it printed and delivered to your door. For printing there are a number of options of the type of book: softback, hardback and dustcover. There are also a number of different qualities of paper.

For the last 5 years a number of us travel away each year as a group of lads for a few days to different places in Europe and we always have a great time. To celebrate our fifth year and our seventh trip I published a book, called "Boys on Tour" with loads of my photos but also included some of the stories of the trips and the reflections of the lads. It was a great success and the book itself is great quality and a marvelous memento of our time together. Best of all everyone loves it.